I recently came across an article on Bloomberg.com about the possible demise of the National Post.
“The National Post Company has never generated a profit and it continues to suffer significant operating losses,” Canwest, which is in bankruptcy protection, said in a court filing. Canwest plans to seek a judge’s permission to transfer the paper to Canwest Ltd. Partnership, which holds Canwest’s other newspaper businesses and isn’t in bankruptcy.
I know that a lot of people talk about the death of the newspaper industry and how much trouble their in etc etc, but let’s be honest here, the business model is not sustainable anymore. It isn’t necessary for news to be communicated through ink and paper, the news industry isn’t dying, just the newsPAPER industry. To complain about it would be like complaining about the demise of the buggy whip industry when the automobile became widely affordable. The business models aren’t quite so clear yet, but that doesn’t mean that the world is going to fall into never ending anarchy. Companies like Canwest rested on their laurels for a long time, content with their position and their fat profits for years. The current times require innovation and adaptation to survive, so get with the times or die.
It’s tough with news content because it’s incredibly easy to paraphrase news content, so protecting your work is more or less impossible, but that shows them they have to differentiate elsewhere. Yes, you need good reporting and storytelling, but you need to focus on community and building a following more than ever. With tools like Twitter available news travels at the speed of thought now. Someone sees something significant happen and as quickly as they can update their Twitter on their iPhone everyone following them knows what they witnessed. The established media (I won’t call them traditional for the time being) need to tap into the power of the zeitgeist, what’s happening now on the minds of their audience, and they need to harness that information. I think provided editorial, and fact checking layers to that stream of consciousness from the masses is valuable for sure, and there will always be a place for that too, but don’t think you can just talk at your audience anymore.
Google is a fantastic tool for organizing the world’s information, and Twitter is a fantastic tool for extracting what is on the minds of the masses. I could definitely see some synergies there, especially from a news perspective since news is all about relevance and timeliness. Twitter could help Google to speed up the pace at which they gather information from the zeitgeist. Anyway, that’s something another post on another day.